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Chapter Three: The Guided Tour - Part Two
Rowan
Rowan blinked and looked around at the beautiful sun and the garden full of flowers. Full, red roses. Delicate foxgloves and perky daisies. There were yellow flags and bluebells and primrose everywhere. Towering, twining ivy curled up stony walls and twisted around framing wooden gates. Rowan inhaled their heady, mixed scents and knew he was home.
Home.
“Rowan?” his mother’s voice called out, soft and lilting as a lullaby.
Rowan jerked in her direction, his heart in his throat.
It was a dream. Rowan was a Drury and too well-immersed in the mystical to be fooled by a mere, brief nocturnal escape. It was a dream. He knew that.
Even so, he wanted—needed—to pretend, even for just a few hours. He stared longingly at her auburn hair cut flatteringly to frame her heart-shaped, fae-like face. Her eyes—the same shade of Drury green as his own—twinkled lovingly at him as her full lips curled in a soft smile.
“We thought you’d gone,” Laurel Drury said, taking a seat next to her son on the warm stone bench in the middle of the castle’s garden. “We came home and couldn’t find you.”
“I saw Grandda,” Rowan started with a choke, “and I…”
“I know,” she said, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him into a tight embrace. Rowan sighed and breathed deep. She even smelled real, like jasmine and wild clover. “You must have been so scared. But Paddy’s fine. Just tripped and fell—you know how he is. Never as careful as he should be. Not like you. You’re always so cautious.” She said it with such pride as if prudence were part of his duty. He supposed it was, in a way.
“But Grandda’s eyes, his throat,” Rowan protested, remembering, “they were…” He covered his eyes, not wanting to think about it, much less say it.
“A trick of the light, dear one,” his mother assured. “Nothing more.” Rowan wanted to believe that. Wanted it so badly. “The room was so dark with spilled mess everywhere. You should have heard Jack scream,” his mother laughed. “We all thought it was Bella that had made such a shriek.”
Rowan chuckled half-heartedly, needing her words even though he couldn’t believe them. “Where are they?”
“Who? Jack and Bella?”
“And the others,” Rowan added.
“They’re fine, Rowan,” his mother told him, stroking his back soothingly. “We’re all just fine.”
Rowan.
He turned at the ghostlike whisper and shivered. “What was that?”
“Nothing, dear one. Another trick.”
Rowan, help us.
Shaking himself from his mother’s arms, he sat up. “I can hear something—”
He gasped as he stared at his mother, who now looked wraith-like and haggard. Her vibrancy muted to unearthly grays until only bruised, blue shadows, like terrible slashes under her eyes, marred her lovely face. She looked cold and weak. Helpless. Hopeless. “Mother?”
“Save us, Rowan,” his mother mouthed pleadingly, her voice distant and frail, “please.”
“Mother,” he cried as he tried to reach for her. But she faded, insubstantial through his fingers as an icy fog stole in, pulling her wispy form away. “No!”
He shot up and ran after her. Dashing into the dark forest, he pushed past the foliage, snapping branches furiously out of his way. He ran until the forest began to thin and he could see sunlight blazing brilliantly beyond the trees. He ran past open, empty fields, the jewel-toned grass dewy and slick beneath his feet.
He ran, his heart pounding and his lungs burning, until he found himself staring up at looming, twisted iron gates, blindingly white and imposing. He turned and ran again. But he bumped into them a second time.
He turned again.
And again.
But every time, they were there.
He spun in a panic as the fences curled cruelly around him with long, gnarled talons reaching out to grip him like an iron fist.
Rowan, he heard faintly on the wind now whipping his shuddering body, we need you.
Rowan woke with a start, blinking up at the high, lofty ceilings of his Elysium suite. Sitting up, he pulled the blankets tight around his shivering body as he stared, wide-eyed and unseeing, into the mirror as a thin, dark-eyed shade stared back at him accusingly.
He had to get out of here. He had to get back.
His family was in trouble. His family needed him. And he was trapped, caged in his pretty prison. Unreachable and unable to reach them.
He’d failed them.
He should have stayed in the castle. Should have fought. Defended his home. Should have done whatever was necessary to protect his family.
Instead, he’d run. Like a coward, he’d fled, thinking more about his own safety than theirs. Perhaps this was his punishment, this gilded limbo.
I should have died, he thought. At least dead, his soul would have been reborn into the next generation. But now, like his uncle’s—trapped in his lidless, lifeless body—Rowan’s Widdershins soul was stuck here.
Worse than worthless.
I should have died, he decided as he flopped back down on the too soft mattress and buried his head beneath his pillows.
If I was dead, he knew, they’d be safe.
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